The Decca legacy of WILHELM KEMPFF, one of the last century’s greatest keyboard poets. Wilhelm Kempff is known, with good reason, as a Beethoven interpreter of sublime simplicity, with several cycles of the concertos and sonatas to his credit, all of them recorded for DG. However, he began recording as early as 1918 and made […]
ALEXANDER GADJIEV, winner of the 2021 Sydney International Piano Competition, makes his debut recording for Decca (Australia) on the Eloquence “New Series” imprint, devoted to brand new recordings. Carrying off the Ernest Hutcheson First Prize but also an additional six prizes at the 2021 Online Edition of the Sydney International Piano Competition, the young Italian-Slovenian […]
From her legendary debut through the succeeding years, Jeanne Demessieux brought virtuosity allied to intellect and sensitivity, and went on to become the glory of the French organ school. This 8-CD celebration of one of the instrument’s most spoken-of, yet enigmatic figures, brings together for the first time her complete Decca recordings and a previously […]
A debut on CD for the American Decca legacy of Ruth Slenczynska, a prodigious Romantic-age keyboard lioness. The biography for her Wigmore Hall recital in March 1957 claimed that the 32-year-old Ruth Slenczynska had given 1600 concerts. Scarcely believably, perhaps, but no less so than other elements of her extraordinary life story – making her […]
A quartet of Liszt tone-poem recordings, new to CD, plus a cherishable recording of Wagner’s musical birthday card to his wife. Karl Münchinger founded the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in 1946, and Decca began making records with them three years later. The polish and vigour of his work in Baroque repertoire is comprehensively documented by a […]
‘In every way the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last 25 years’ was Percy Grainger’s pronouncement of the young Eileen Joyce (1908–1991) when he first heard her play in 1926. From the goldfields in Western Australia whose capital city is the most remote in the world, Joyce defied incongruous and […]
Music from five original Argo albums, newly remastered and compiled together for the first time in a 2CD set, with new booklet notes on the music and a tribute to Simon Preston. During the 1960s, it often seemed as if a new Simon Preston organ LP appeared every few months: so much in demand was […]
Issued in the US under the title ‘Witches’ Brew’, Alexander Gibson and the New Symphony Orchestra of London recorded this album in 1959 and the performances remain today as characterful and incisive as they were then. While pieces from this recording have previously appeared on Decca, this is its first complete release on the label. […]
Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie, based on the Faust legend, is an hour-long work for tenor, choir and orchestra, based on the Faust legend. The Suisse Romande Orchestra take to this complex score, one with which they could hardly have been familiar, with clear enthusiasm and imbue the performance with alertness and vivacity. The woodwind playing of […]
Eschewing the barn-storming bravura of some of his colleagues, Claudio Arrau brought an extra dimension – a spiritual, meditative one – to his performances of Liszt and these recordings of the Concertos unfold with unequalled grandeur. Equally compelling are his expansive readings of the three ‘Études de Concert’.
From Decca’s rich catalogue of piano music comes a generous selection of miniatures for piano, many of them quiet, all of them popular and much sought-after, in the finest of performances, of course.
Aromatherapy, the quiet moments of classical music. And the seventh volume, Reflections in the Water, is the ultimate tranquility! Water is a force of nature that inspired composers to some of their most languid compositions, from the Baroque (Handel’s Water Music written for a royal party held on a barge) to Impressionistic (the aqueous ripples and shimmer […]
